Employability and roles

Since I’m interested in how the use of technology by different generations is played out in the workplace, as well as in universities, I’ve been looking for opportunities to talk to the sort of people who might employ our graduates, about my framework for millennial students. (If you’re an employer and you’re reading this, and interested in the framework, please get in touch) One interesting, anecdotal, and constructive piece of feedback I got from an employer, was that my ideas are all very well for middle-class, graduate, knowledge workers, but might appear irrelevant to others.

Up to a point, I plead guilty. I work in a business school, and our graduates might expect to become entrepreneurs, chief information officers, management consultants, even business gurus. I don’t particularly expect them to become surgeons or train drivers, though I’ve no doubt that there are people with business or management degrees in all the jobs that I’ve mentioned. Within universities, there’s an interest in employability, and that implies that we look at the sort of jobs that our graduates do.

But I’m not convinced that generational changes are only an issue for people who work in offices, and depend on knowledge which can be delivered down a broadband connection. I think the millennial generation have a very different set of expectations from their predecessors on a load of issues, including work-life balance, which will affect the way they work in many different roles.